Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Done with Wordle

    Wordle now seems to hide stats: after I solved today's puzzle, it prompted me to log in. And so I guess I'm done with Wordle? Or at least, the NYT version. There's a Geminispace version, but it's not quite as good - part of the appeal of original was that it minimized "bullshit words", words that are definitely English, but very rarely used.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BESKLOI Wordo: FUROR

  • Sauerkraut thinking

    My brain has been pretty good this week, which is somewhat surprising given what's been thrown at it over the last few weeks. I workshopped this with Alissa and she referred to my good brain state as "Sauerkraut thinking". I misspelled it in today's picture, oh well.

  • April 5, 2024 - Friday of Easter Week(W)

    The Lord brought them out in hope, alleluia, and the sea overwhelmed their enemies, alleluia, alleluia.

    Psalm: Attend, O My people, to My law: incline your ears to the words of My mouth.

    Glory be to the Father. The Lord brought them out in hope, alleluia, and the sea overwhelmed their enemies, alleluia, alleluia.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Relatively Accidental

    LilyPond (a program for music typesetting) supports the notion of relative notes so that one can type

    [...]So one idea is to have something that supports a very small subset of the LilyPond syntax and can quickly convert that to MIDI, or if necessary (and presumably less often) into a full file that LilyPond can render. Therefore, one needs to support relative notes, and resolve such questions as if you have a "bisis" followed by a "feses", should the double-flat F be placed above or below the double-sharp B? If you go by the raw MIDI pitch number, 61 (a B♯♯) and 63 (a nearby F♭♭) are pretty close to one another… or does something else need to happen?

  • I love it when abstractions are too abstract to be useful

    I recently found [1] an annoying aspect of Xlib [2]—it's hard to find documentation about what keys affect the state field of the keyboard event. It's obvious that the shift keys on the keyboard will set ShiftMask, the control key will set ControlMask, and the CapsLock key will set LockMask (when I would expect it to set ShiftMask since it's just locking the shift keys to “on”), but there's little to say what keys set the Mod1Mask, Mod2Mask, Mod3Mask, Mod4Mask and Mod5Mask.

  • Emacs: Zeptoforth Interface (publ. 2024-04-04)

    However, one obstacle has been that Zeptoforth uses a non-standard flow control system based on ACK and NAK bytes. It is a good system, but it is not supported by any of the usual serial communication programs like picocom and minicom. In brief, Zeptoforth receives and processes one line, and then it send an ACK indicating it is ready for more input. If an error occurs while processing the line, like a compile error or a stack underflow, Zeptoforth will send a NAK as well, before sending the ACK. If you try to send multiple lines without respecting the flow control system, it is possible that some of your input will be malformed, or that your code will be broken because some line didn't compile.

  • Asynchronous Syncing

    Recently I've been thinking about how I can reduce my computing and energy footprint. I'm trying all sorts of new workflows, from using low-power devices to removing GUIs on some of them. Where I feel comfortable doing it, I am also removing Syncthing and not have an always-on syncing program running.

    I hope to not need Syncthing at all one day. It would be nice to have a store-and-forward or other asynchronous tool, similar to git or NNCP, that can look at the differences between two directories and resolve their divergences. That way I can keep only one or two small servers as file hosts, or even as dumb relays that simply connect machines to each other like croc.

  • Competition

    Just because something isn’t a monopoly doesn’t mean all problems are solved. When the people are being beaten by a stick, they aren’t much happier if they can choose the stick from either Apple App Store or Google Play.

    In a conversation about something else with a friend the other day he used the word “monopolistic” to describe our behated corporate overlords, and I’ve been rereading Bakuman which is a comic about comics creators competing with each other and I’m in an arch now where the editors are like “no wait we can’t read the other teams comics because that would be cheating” and I’m like... You’re all trying to make the magazine as a whole as good as it can be, right?

  • Programming

    • Tracking down a bug

      I've spent the past two days tracking down a bug, and I think it's a library issue.

      So I have this program I wrote some time ago that uses Xlib [1] and for reasons, I needed to store a 64-bit value that's related to a window. This is easy enough with setting a window property.